Live: Al Jazeera coverage of Egypt’s growing revolution

[Searcher08]

Ugh. That is just disgusting, Alice.
I was thinking about your description of the geriatric SCAF yesterday; the Channel 4 news here had a lot of coverage of it. The scene of the first train arriving at Cairo station was extraordinary. I don't think I have ever seen so many people so burningly angry in one concentrated physical place.

[vanlose kid]

How Egypt’s revolution descended into tragedy on night of violence in Port Said
The unassuming Cairo graduate in designer glasses succinctly summed up Egypt’s balance of power. “The two biggest political parties in Egypt are Ahly and Zamalek. It’s bigger than politics,” he said.
By James Montague

7:00AM GMT 03 Feb 2012

It was 2007 and Assad had just helped to form Al Ahlawy, a fan group for his beloved Al Ahly, a giant of Egyptian football, who have won the title a record 36 times. Heavily influenced by Italy’s flamboyant, and often violent, Ultra fan groups, Assad decided to start his own. A few hundred met, carrying hastily painted banners and singing freshly composed chants at the Cairo International Stadium.

Their opposition that day were their hated city rivals Zamalek but Assad and his Ahlawy reserved their true hatred for a bigger foe. The Mubarak regime.

Every weekend the ultras of Egyptian football would ignite rivalries between local clubs but, more significantly, would fight the heavy-handed police, the brutal enforcers of Mubarak’s authoritarian rule. Protest graffiti began to appear.

Leaders were arbitrarily arrested and detained. Chants became increasingly more anti-government as the violence increased. “Regime! Be very scared of us, we are coming tonight with intent,” Al Ahlawy would sing. “The supporters of Al Ahly will fire everything up. God almighty will make us victorious. Go, hooligans!”

For ultras like Assad, the crackdown showed that the authorities were scared of the disaffected young people growing out of their country’s football stadiums.

“The whole concept of any independent organisation didn’t exist, not unions, not political parties,” he said. “Then we started to organise football ultras ... to them it was the youth, in big numbers -- very smart people -- who could mobilise themselves quickly. They feared us.”

Violence has long been part of Egyptian football, and not all of it had its roots in opposition. The Ahly-Zamalek derby, one steeped in age old nationalist antagonisms as much as proximity, has often provoked clashes between the fans as much as the police. So much so that the match is played at the neutral Cairo International Stadium and foreign referees take change of the matches.

Ayman Younis, a former Egyptian international, played for Zamalek in the 1980s and 90s and remembers how the passions would sometimes rise to terrifying levels. He said: “In 1990 I found my BMW car on its side and they had signed it ‘Ahly Fans’. And that was when we lost 2-0, but they remembered that I scored in the first game earlier in the season.”

On another occasion 5,000 opposition fans turned up at his house. Yet it was in 2009 that the frustrations in Egyptian football made global headlines. A World Cup qualifier between Egypt and Algeria already had bad blood. In 1990, when the two teams met for a World Cup play-off, which Egypt surprisingly won, riots broke out following fighting on the pitch. Egypt’s team doctor lost an eye after being bottled, allegedly, by a member of the Algerian team.

When the two teams met 19 years later the government-controlled press reminded everyone of the slight, raising the pressure before the game. Mubarak had often wrapped himself in the flag of the national team, the most successful in African history and holders of the Africa Cup of Nations, to boost his popularity. So much so that ultras like Assad refused to support the national team.

The negative, anti-Algerian press led to violence, specifically when the Algerian team bus was attacked and several of the players injured. Government-controlled media reported that the Algerian players had injured themselves. When Algeria eventually beat Egypt, riots broke out in Cairo, Khartoum, Algiers, the south of France, even London. Ambassadors were recalled. Colonel Gaddafi even offered to mediate between the two countries. What had started as a football match ended in a diplomatic incident.

Little over a year later, Mubarak was gone thanks to the January revolution with the ultras playing their part in his downfall. For the first time the ultra groups of Al Ahly and Zamalek joined forces and marched in their thousands to Tahrir Square. With few groups in Egyptian society having any experience of resisting the police, the ultras found themselves on the front line.

“We are fighting them [the police] in every match. We know them,” Ahmed, a leader of Zamalek’s Ultras White Knights group, told me last April. “We know when they [the police] run, when we should make them run. We were teaching them [the protesters] how to throw bricks.”

The détente did not last. With the hated police retreating from the grounds, 2011 saw a huge rise in violence. In April, when Al Ahly last travelled to Port Said to play Al Masri, 20 people were injured when riots broke out between both sets of fans at the train station. The Al Ahly team complained that their bus was attacked by rocks and the Egyptian FA even considered cancelling the league.

Now as pictures emerge of bloodstained seats few in Egypt believe this was a tragic accident or the result of brutal football thuggery. Many questions remain.

Why did the police watch on as Al Masri fans stormed the pitch? Why were the gates left locked? Why did many of Al Masri’s fans apparently carry weapons? The answer for many ultras lies with the military council who rule the country. As Assad said after escaping the carnage: “It’s the army and police[’s] way to get back at the ultras for our stand against them in the revolution.”

James Montague is the author of When Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone, a book about football and politics in the Middle East.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/footba ... -Said.html

*

[AlicetheKurious]

These are the Ultras, forming the image of a pig between the initials ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) during a game. The Ultras are also infamous for their frequently obscene but hilarious chants against the police (and against other teams), which are not audible in this video. At around 1:15 you can clearly see the black-clad police in front of the bleachers where the Ultras are:



Young, crazy and rude, but brave and genuinely honorable, too.

[vanlose kid]

Egyptian police incited massacre at stadium, say angry footballers

Captain of team and his brother say violence in which more 70 fans died had been planned

The Observer, Sunday 5 February 2012

Twin brothers who play for the football team Al-Masry, whose match against a rival team in Egypt ended in a massacre, claim the violence was encouraged by the police with the backing of the army.

Captain Karim Zekri and his brother, Mohamed, told the website CommentMidEast.com that there was strong evidence the bloodshed was planned. More than 70 people were killed and at least 1,000 injured in the violence at the Port Said stadium following the home side Al-Masry's victory over Cairo-based Al-Ahly.

After the match finished, hundreds of Al-Masry supporters were seen to surge across the pitch to the visitors' end as panicked Ahly fans made for the exit. But it has emerged the steel doors were bolted shut, resulting in dozens being crushed to death.

"I have many friends who were in the stadium, and they swear to me that the police were saying to them 'Go and beat the shit out of them [Ahly fans] – they're saying you're not men'," said Mohamed, who was not playing and watched the game in a cafe near the stadium.

"During the second half, I saw about 10 armed thugs gathering outside the stadium, right in front of the police; there were about 50 policemen, but not a single one of them moved. The thugs had swords and were probably hiding other weapons. But I found the response of the police really odd. Other thugs arrived in cars and some went straight round to the away stand."

The 26-year-old brothers are symbols of Port Said football. Karim is a household name in Egypt, while his brother was considered the golden boy of Egyptian football earlier in his career.

Karim told the Egyptian football commentator Islam Issa that both teams had been ordered to their changing rooms after the match finished and the violence had broken out. It was only later that he realised what had happened. "We'd left our changing rooms and gone to the Ahly players' changing rooms to make sure they were OK, and there, we saw the disaster," Karim said. "I found corpses on the floor, and most of the deaths were from suffocation. People were squashed together and ended up dying that way. I went out of the changing rooms to help the Ahly fans get out."

He said the stadium's floodlights had been switched off. "We found out later that this happened as soon as we'd gone in – and this was one of the main causes of the disaster because people stamped on each other. I found people on the floor and I kept taking as many out of the stadium as I could and returning. The strange thing is that there were no police in the stands or in the player's tunnel where I was taking them out from."

The twins' claims are likely to reinforce the belief that the violence was orchestrated by the army against the "Ultras", the Al-Ahly fans whose experience confronting police at football matches was deployed with devastating effect against Egypt's security forces during the Arab spring.

Mohamed said he had felt something was wrong before kick-off. "Firstly, there was no real searching of fans as they entered the stadium, which is really unusual," he said. "Tickets weren't being checked, and there was no searching at all. And for the first time in the history of our town, the governor and chief of police did not attend this game."

Karim said he had heard that a man arrested on Friday had confessed to helping orchestrate the violence. "He said that there were more than 600 people hired from outside Port Said who entered the game. They'd taken money from one of the sacked National Democratic party members … He told them to kill and cause havoc in the stadium, and now everyone is searching for him."

The brothers said they believed they were risking their lives by speaking out. "We are both ready to die like those who already have, if that's what it takes for the truth to emerge, and God willing, everyone will know the truth soon," Mohamed declared.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/fe ... rab-spring

*

[AlicetheKurious]

If one good thing has come out of this, it's the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists have now conclusively demonstrated that, behind their beards, they are EXACTLY the same as Mubarak's NDP. Exactly, exactly. The same bullshit, the same weaselly verbiage, the same slippery sleaze, the same ass-kissing to their American overlords and allegiance to a right-wing economic agenda, the same contempt for the people they claim to represent. The more they talk (and how they talk!) the more infuriated their listeners become, even those who supported them!

In stark contrast, the parliamentary minority of secularists, both liberals and leftists, are showing what it means to represent the people responsibly and with integrity. Far from being tokens, they are shining like beacons and overshadowing the majority.

The MB and Salafists may have taken the parliament in fraudulent elections, but still, they were given a choice to acquire legitimacy and redeem themselves by aligning themselves with the people, or to tar themselves with the same smelly brush as the SCAF and the rest of the Mubarak regime.

By the grace of God, they chose the latter, thus signing their own death warrant and by the same token giving new life to the revolution, which will not rest until Egyptians are free. I promise, it's only a matter of time.

[AlicetheKurious]

A nationwide general strike has been called starting February 11th (it's Saturday, but this is a working day in Egypt, especially in the huuuge public sector).

There are 5 specific demands:

1) Transfer of all its powers from the SCAF to a civilian authority;

2) Resignation of the Attorney General, the Coroner and the SCAF-appointed government;

3) Arrest and immediate trial of all authority figures in the former corrupt regime, including the SCAF, for its criminal mismanagement of the country's affairs and for the murder of its citizens;

4) Transfer of all civilians imprisoned by military courts to civilian jurisdiction, to receive fair trials before civilian judges;

5) Immediate and complete lifting of the state of emergency, and guaranteeing that all civilians will be tried only in civilian courts, before civilian judges and under civilian laws.

This is what I've been waiting for, advocating and praying for. I hope it works.

On Edit: WOOOHOO! The list of labor, student and activist groups joining the call for a general strike on February 11 is growing by leaps and bounds. More are joining every minute.

[JackRiddler]

.

Taking this as the "Arab Spring" thread, here's Scahill at length on the situation in Yemen.

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/2/16/j ... d_islamist

February 16, 2012

Jeremy Scahill: U.S. Has Ignited Islamist Uprising in Impoverished, Divided Yemen


Has U.S. counterterrorism policy in Yemen strengthened the very threat it sought to eliminate? We speak with journalist Jeremy Scahill, who reports in a new cover story for The Nation magazine that U.S. drone strikes, civilian drone casualties and deepening poverty in Yemen have all contributed to the rise of an Islamist uprising. "The arrogance of the U.S. was always thinking that whatever U.S. official was sent to Yemen was smarter than Ali Abdullah Saleh," Scahill says. "[Saleh] was a master chess player, and he milked counterterrorism as his cash cow... [U.S.-supplied] forces have almost never been used to actually battle anyone determined to be terrorists. They’ve existed primarily for the defense of the Saleh regime." [includes rush transcript]


Guest:
Jeremy Scahill, the national security correspondent for The Nation magazine and author of the bestselling book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.



JUAN GONZALEZ: We begin today’s show in Yemen, where political turmoil is pushing the country to the brink of a humanitarian crisis. The United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, says more than half of Yemen’s 12 million children are chronically malnourished. Unemployment in the country has reached 35 percent. Thirteen-year-old Osman told reporters he washes cars for spare change, earning under five U.S. dollars a month for his efforts.

OSMAN: [translated] The financial condition of my family is not good. We have many family members and run short of money. My father is ill in bed and can’t work. My family is also in debt.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world despite receiving over $300 million in military and security aid from the United States over the past five years. Much of that money has gone into an aggressive and controversial counterterrorism campaign rather than programs of humanitarian relief.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, a new cover story in The Nation magazine says U.S. counterterrorism operations have ignited an Islamist uprising. The article by Jeremy Scahill, called "Washington’s War in Yemen Backfires," says U.S. missile strikes, civilian drone casualties and deepening poverty in Yemen have all contributed to the rise of groups such as Ansar al-Sharia and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. These groups have gained popularity partly by filling a void left by the central government in Yemen. They repair roads, restore electricity, distribute food, and run security patrols. The article goes on to say U.S. counterterrorism policy may have strengthened the very threat it sought to eliminate by linking military aid to counterterrorism efforts and inciting anger through drone warfare.

Jeremy Scahill joins us now to discuss his latest piece. He’s the national security correspondent for The Nation magazine, author of the bestselling book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, and a Democracy Now! correspondent.

Jeremy, welcome to Democracy Now! Welcome back, of course.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about this trip that you just recently returned from in Yemen.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, you know, Yemen is in a situation right now where the only ruler that a unified Yemen has really known, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who governed the country for 33 years, is going to be officially leaving power. And there’s going to be an election next week where there’s only one candidate, the vice president of the country. And while this election is playing out in front of the eyes of the world, many Yemenis say they’re going to boycott it, that they don’t feel that it’s democratic, that an election does not mean you have one person that you either vote yes or no for. And so, you have protests that are sort of taking place around the capital of Sana’a. But the rest of Yemen, and even in the capital, Sana’a, is concerned more with local issues, issues of security and stability, than they are with participating in an election that they consider to be a sort of farce.

The only U.S. priority in Yemen, as has been articulated through U.S. funding, is the issue of counterterrorism. The United States is absolutely obsessed with 300 to 700 people that are members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has identified it as the single greatest terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland. And, you know, U.S. officials talk about AQAP, this group, in a way that I think gives it a lot more power than it’s capable of. Yes, the underwear bomber, the alleged underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, went to Yemen and then left Yemen and tried to bring down the airliner over Detroit. The parcel bomb plot, where there were these printer cartridges put on planes, and they attempted to ship them as explosives to Jewish community centers in the United States, originated in Yemen. And of course you had Anwar al-Awlaki, who was a U.S.-born cleric who basically—his entire power in the world was due to YouTube, where he would go on YouTube and, you know, make proclamations. And you saw him sort of get radicalized as the U.S. intensified attacks against Yemen. That’s about it. That’s what you have in Yemen. And yet it is the source of a great deal of funding on a counterterrorism level, and really obsessive-compulsive behavior on the part of U.S. intelligence officials.

Having said that, there is a real group in Yemen called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and they do in fact want to attack the United States. What’s happened, though, is that the Obama administration picked up from where the Bush administration left off. The Bush administration, beginning in the mid-2000s, started to build up Yemeni counterterrorism forces that were entirely controlled by Ali Abdulla Saleh’s family. His nephew, Yahya, ran the counterterrorism unit. His son, Ahmed Ali, ran the Republican Guard. They got all of this funding from the U.S. They built up those forces. Those forces have almost never been used to actually battle anyone determined to be terrorists. They’ve existed primarily for the defense of the Saleh regime. And all this U.S. money, way disproportion—disproportionate to the amount of money the U.S. has spent on humanitarian aid, has gone basically to the Saleh family military units.

Obama, though, did something that President Bush had only done once, to my knowledge, and that is to start to bomb Yemen. On December 17th, 2009, President Obama authorized cruise missile strikes against Yemen, and they smashed into a remote village in Abyan province called al-Majala and killed more than 40 Bedouins. And when that incident happened, on December 17th, 2009, the Yemeni government took responsibility for those bombings and said that it was a counterterrorism operation, that it had succeeded, that a number of al-Qaeda people were killed. There were even reports that Awlaki himself was killed. Well, it turns out that, in fact, it was a U.S. missile strike, that it was Tomahawk cruise missiles. In fact, we were able to interview people from that village: one woman who lost seven members of her family; another man, 17 members of his family. It was a dirt poor Bedouin village that was hit. There was only one man that anyone in the area could identify as having any connection to al-Qaeda, and it was—he was a mujahideen during the war in Afghanistan, which, of course, the United States was supporting the mujahideen during the mujahideen war in the 1980s. That then kicked off a series of air strikes. The Obama administration began an air war in Yemen. Sometimes the strikes hit the people that were the intended targets, but oftentimes civilians were killed.

And so, what happened is that the prophecy envisioned by the leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and envisioned by Anwar al-Awlaki, came true. And that was that the United States intended to turn Yemen into its next Afghanistan, its next Iraq, its next Pakistan. So you had the one-two punch—or actually, there were three punches. The first one is the air strikes. The second one is supporting Saleh family military units. And then the third is not funding any humanitarian programs and allowing the vast majority of the U.S. money to go toward units which were then used as agents of domestic repression.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But Jeremy, let me ask you, because Saleh’s argument always was, for clinging to power, that he was the force of stability that would prevent al-Qaeda from growing in Yemen: to what degree is there domestic resistance that’s separate and apart from al-Qaeda in Yemen, armed resistance? And to what degree is it largely al-Qaeda?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, look, the arrogance of the U.S. was always thinking that U.S.—that whatever U.S. official was sent to Yemen was smarter than Ali Abdullah Saleh. He was a master chess player, and he milked counterterrorism as his cash cow. And he did it beginning in November of 2001, when he came to Washington and pitched President Bush on the idea that "I’m going to be your ally in the war on terror." I mean, Ali Abdullah Saleh has sent jihadists to Afghanistan. There were—I remember, when I was in Baghdad in 2002, all of these Yemeni Baathists showed up in Baghdad to fight. There’s no way they would have gone there without the consent of the Saleh government. And so, Juan, to answer your question, yeah, the Saleh regime was very clever, and it used the U.S. paranoia, you know, about Islamic terrorism to get hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from the U.S., when in reality, the strongest forces in Yemen opposing his government had almost nothing to do with al-Qaeda whatsoever.

In fact, you could argue that Ali Abdullah Saleh had a closer relationship to these Islamist militants than his domestic opponents. You have a southern secessionist movement. Yemen used to be two countries, remember. There was the socialist south, and then—which had all of the natural resources, and then there was the north. And Ali Abdullah Saleh was able to consolidate his grip on power when he unified the countries by bringing in all of these tribes that had been expelled by the socialists and saying, "Hey, I’m going to give you your power back." So he had this patronage network that he set up of the tribes. But there is a very, very strong secessionist movement in the south. In fact, when we were in Aden, which is the port city in the south where the USS Cole was bombed in 2000, October of 2000, the southern flag was flying. There was graffiti on the walls: "North, get out of the south." And I spoke with several powerful tribal sheikhs that said, "Now that Ali Abdullah Saleh is gone, we want southern Yemen to take over the south again." In the north, you have a rebellion of a minority of Shiite Muslims. They’re called the Houthis. In fact, Ali Abdullah Saleh is not a Sunni; he’s a Zaidi Shiite from North Yemen. But he sided with all of these Sunni forces inside of Yemen. And the Houthis have been engaged in a rebellion against Saleh’s government for years. And the Saleh government has mercilessly pummeled the Houthis. And it’s drawn in a proxy war involving the Saudis attacking, on the one hand, and then you have the Houthis seeking out support, you know, from other Shiite allies in the region.

So Saleh has manipulated, masterfully, the threat of al-Qaeda to get weapons and to build up his forces, that could be used then only for the defense of the regime, only to take out his political opponents. When Ali Abdullah Saleh felt that the U.S. was ignoring him, all of a sudden 20 al-Qaeda suspects would escape from a prison. And so, you know, we went to this city, Zinjibar, which is in Abyan province in the south of Yemen. Almost no journalists have ever made it into that city. We went to the front lines to investigate, because a group calling itself Ansar al-Sharia had taken over a number of towns, including Zinjibar. And when I started interviewing people who were very well connected to the security apparatus in Yemen, they said Ali Abdullah Saleh let them to take it over, as a sort of last message to the United States, that if you let me go, I am going to show you what will happen, and what will happen is that al-Qaeda is going to take over. And so, all of a sudden you see Ansar al-Sharia, you know, the supporters or partisans of Sharia law, taking over these cities and creating their own Sharia councils, doing very brutal acts against suspected criminals, chopping off limbs.

Just a few days ago, there were three public executions of people that were convicted in the Ansar al-Sharia’s court system of providing intelligence to the Americans to be used in drone attacks, including one person who was executed in the very place where Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, who was a U.S. citizen, was killed in a U.S. drone strike. And they executed this man, alleging that he had provided intelligence to the Americans that had contributed to the death of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki. You know, President Obama authorized strikes that resulted in three U.S. citizens being killed within less than a month in Yemen: Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico; Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son; and then Samir Khan, who was another U.S. citizen from North Carolina and was the editor of Inspire magazine, the English-language publication of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. All three of those U.S. citizens were killed within one month.

And so, you know, in short, what you have is suspicion that maybe Saleh allowed this to happen, on the one hand. But then, on the other hand, all of these powerful tribes, that are infinitely more powerful than al-Qaeda, that al-Qaeda wants no war with at all, because they would lose, are now starting to say, "If there’s no government here, if there’s no services, if the Americans are bombing us and killing Bedouins and our civilians and leaving cluster bombs in our countryside and doing nothing to clean them up, and not providing any civilian infrastructure support but just supporting Saleh’s family military and just bombing us, what motive do we have to fight al-Qaeda? They’re our—they’re people from our tribes. They don’t bother us. So, what’s our motivation?" One tribal leader, who said, very clearly, "Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization. Yes, these guys want to destroy America," said to me, "You consider them terrorists; we consider the drones terrorism," because they don’t bother—they don’t bother them. They’re a threat, on a tiny magnitude, to the United States and its allies, that has been given a prominence in the U.S. counterterrorism paranoia machine that is almost laughable, if it’s not so serious.

AMY GOODMAN: And the relationship between Ansar and AQAP, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, the first mentions of Ansar al-Sharia came from one of the leading clerics of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula a couple of months before Zinjibar was seized. Zinjibar was—the city was taken by Ansar al-Sharia in May of 2011. And this leading AQAP cleric said, "Ansar al-Sharia is the name we use to introduce ourselves, you know, to communities when we’re trying to promote our political message." So, essentially what he was saying is, "We’re trying to rebrand and not use the al-Qaeda brand, because it’s become so tarnished. And this is our new way of sort of presenting our mission without having to be bogged down by the baggage associated with calling ourselves al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."

Whether it’s a front group for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which senior government officials in Yemen and a lot of other analysts allege, yeah, it’s just a front group—whether that’s true or not has almost become irrelevant, because the ideas, the ideas advocated by Ansar al-Sharia, are actually taking root. And so, that’s why this is blowback, because you have a rising—you have multiple Salafist, very conservative sort of sects of Islam that are becoming increasingly popular in Yemen. You have a lawless state. You have an implosion of the government. You have a political crisis where the only opportunity for people to vote is "do you want this man or not?" Once again, you follow a 33-year dictatorship by having a vote where only one person is on the ballot. And people are sort of saying, well, for now, it’s better to have law and order—and yeah, these guys are beheading thieves and all that stuff, but—or chopping off hands of thieves, beheading alleged spies, but hey, it’s better than no law and order.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And meanwhile, the popular movement that got all the attention, because it was in the cities and it was easier to cover by the foreign press, how is it faring, especially vis-à-vis these upcoming elections and the possibility of any real change in the country?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean, you had all these—like in so many other countries we’ve seen, it was fueled by young people bravely coming out into public squares and holding demonstrations. And that youth revolution that really sparked this movement in Yemen has been sidelined, and now you have an attempt to co-opt it from two of Saleh’s former henchmen. One, General Ali Mohsen, was the most powerful military man in the country, head of the First Armored Division. He "defected," quote-unquote, to the opposition, and very crudely just tried to co-opt it. But he has a huge number of armed men behind him. And then, Sheikh Omar, who was one of Saleh’s greatest supporters, "brought his weight over," quote-unquote, to the opposition. And then the Islah Party, which is the official sort of loyalist opposition party in Yemen for a long time, which is sort of—you know, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, is the main political opposition now. The youth of Yemen that came into the square are not adequately represented at all among the people that are going to be the future power brokers of Yemen.

And let’s be clear on one thing—and no one wants to talk about this: Ali Abdullah Saleh was a popular leader and had support. I’m not saying that all of Yemen was behind him; it was an incredibly divided country. But this wasn’t a guy—he didn’t go the way of Mubarak, for a reason: he had a lot of support and a lot of people, tribes, whose livelihood depended on him. And he was a, I have to say this again, a master chess player, domestically and internationally.

AMY GOODMAN: Liked or feared?

JEREMY SCAHILL: So—what’s that?

AMY GOODMAN: Liked or feared?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I think—I think both. I think feared, because, you know, you wouldn’t want to get stuck in the Yemeni prison system. There were demonstrators that seemed to be outright murdered, you know, particularly in March of 2011. There was widespread political repression. The Saleh family controlled everything in the country. No question he was a dictator—and a violent, brutal dictator at that. But there are—and I met many people who very passionately articulated why they supported Ali Abdullah Saleh. And, you know, so I think, yeah, a lot of people did fear him. He also paid the right people at the right time.

AMY GOODMAN: The president now, Saleh, is staying at the Ritz-Carlton, and there’s been a number of protests outside the luxury hotel denouncing President Obama’s decision to allow Saleh to enter the United States. I wanted to—one of the protests, the Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize winner, Tawakkul Karman, addressed the protest via cell phone and called for Saleh to be tried in the International Criminal Court. This is one of the protesters, Amel Ahmed.

AMEL AHMED: Dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh is staying at this hotel, so we came out to protest the fact that our government would allow him into this country, to begin with. We don’t feel that he should be here in the United States of America. We think it sends the wrong message to the Middle East. If you’re saying that you support democracy in the Middle East and you’re anti-extremism in the Middle East, then you shouldn’t be supporting dictators. You should be supporting people on the ground who are calling for democracy. I mean, for years, we’ve criticized the Muslim world for turning to extremism and not sharing the same democratic values. Meanwhile, we have an entire generation that’s rising up and demanding democracy, and meanwhile, we’re here hosting a dictator in a five-star hotel. I mean, it’s just—the message is conflicting, and there should be a consistent message coming from the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: And one of the protesters threw a shoe at Saleh when he was leaving the Ritz-Carlton or entering it.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, what is Saleh’s fate? Elections are coming up.

JEREMY SCAHILL: I think part of the reason why the United States brought Ali Abdullah Saleh to the U.S. was they—the idea was they wanted to get him away from Yemen so that some kind of a transition could take place, although my understanding from—I’ve talked with Saleh’s people. He fully intends to go back and be there when his vice president takes power, and he wants to be there for that ceremony. And, you know, I mean, it’s interesting because Saleh is going to continue to be a very powerful person in Yemen, regardless of what any of his opponents believe. His party is going to survive. He is going to be an incredibly powerful man.

And I think that the real question for the U.S. right now is what’s going to happen with its counterterrorism operations going forward. Part of the reason why the Obama administration was so slow to overtly agitate for Saleh’s departure is because they’re afraid that whoever comes next is going to—is not going to be as cooperative. And it’s almost certain that they will not be as cooperative. I interviewed leading members of the Islah Party, and they said, "We will not be contractors for the U.S. government. We’ll be partners, but we won’t be contractors." And they said that, you know, that Saleh was used as a contractor by the U.S.

Now, there’s problems with that analysis, but the point being, Yemenis of all political stripes don’t like these bombings. They don’t like the fact that the Obama administration and the Bush administration built up the Saleh family military. So, you know, the U.S. has not generated a lot of good will in almost any quarters in Yemen, because—I mean, the demonstrators perceived it as "Why is the U.S. continuing to support this guy?" on the one hand. And then everyone is saying, "Why are you bombing civilians? You know, we don’t care if you" — a lot of people say, "We don’t care if you kill al-Qaeda people, but you’re not killing al-Qaeda people. They’re walking around in restaurants." You know, the two senior leaders of al-Qaeda, Wahishi and al-Shihri, apparently were just in a restaurant in Shabwa province the other day. And I know that because the tribal leader who saw them in the restaurant and said he said "As-Salaam Alaikum" to them, and they said "As-Salaam Alaikum" back, was like, "Oh, yeah, I see them all the time now. The U.S. doesn’t—they’re bombing the wrong places. These guys are just walking around." So the perception is that the U.S. has been wrong constantly, always gotten it wrong on Yemen. The vast majority of Yemenis see it that way.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And it doesn’t look, at this stage, as there’s—a civil war is going to break out, which is what the U.S. government is claiming it fears, and in reality, there’s more—the civil war has really erupted in Syria more than it has in Yemen, even though that was feared to be the main country that was going to fall apart.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, there’s a thousand civil wars in Yemen, you know, every week that happen. And, you know, it’s—there’s not really a government there. The tribes control everything. And so, there’s already, you know, all these civil wars. The key to resolving anything in Yemen is working through the sort of labyrinth tribal system there. And the U.S. is just pissing off all of these tribes.

AMY GOODMAN: The ACLU has filed a lawsuit to get information about the bombing, the killing of Awlaki, of his son. Talk about that.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And trying to get information, suing them for continually invoking state secrets.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, you know, in Yemen, I spent a lot of time with Anwar al-Awlaki’s family, with his father, with the head of the Awlaki tribe. You know, and they—people understand why the U.S. government killed Anwar al-Awlaki, but these are also very intelligent people who have spent time in the U.S. Awlaki’s dad went to school here. And he said, "Is it normal in the United States that you assassinate your own citizens when they haven’t been charged with a crime?" I mean, Awlaki wasn’t convicted of anything. He wasn’t charged with any crime in a U.S. court. This has nothing to do with what we think of him as a person. There’s rules of law and order. And so, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, prior to Awlaki being assassinated on authority from President Obama, simply tried to ask the U.S. government, "On what authority are you going to assassinate this U.S. citizen?"

AMY GOODMAN: Right. CCR represented his father, right?

JEREMY SCAHILL: They represented his father. And that case was ultimately thrown out. And, you know, no one in Congress wants to touch this, except Senator Wyden and Dennis Kucinich. Senator Wyden said that it’s unacceptable that the Obama administration has still not provided Congress—not about the American people, Congress—with the authority that they killed Awlaki under.

Then, two weeks later, after Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, two U.S. citizens, are killed—by the way, Samir Khan’s family was called by the State Department after he was killed. And they didn’t say, "We killed him." They said, you know, "Your son," who’s a U.S. citizen, "was killed in Yemen," and expressed condolences for him. Then, two weeks later, 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who is a normal teenager, who hadn’t seen his dad in years, who was living with his grandparents, on Facebook, going out for dinner with his friends, a normal 16-year-old kid, is killed in a strike. And the claim was he was with an AQAP leader, al-Banna. Al-Banna wasn’t killed in that strike; he wasn’t there. Who was the target in the strike that killed a 16-year-old U.S. citizen, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki? I don’t claim to know, but as a journalist and as an American citizen, we have a right to know. Why did three U.S. citizens get killed in less than a month on President Obama’s authorization? Why?

So the ACLU and CCR, Center for Constitutional Rights, are simply trying to do what journalists should be doing, what members of Congress should be doing, which is to say, if the U.S. is asserting its right to kill its own citizens without trial, without due process, why? Under what authority? How is it legal? And so, that’s what’s at the heart of what the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU are doing right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, we want to thank you for being with us. Jeremy Scahill, award-winning investigative journalist, author of the bestselling book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, he is just recently back from Yemen, national security correspondent for The Nation magazine. His cover story is called "Washington’s War in Yemen Backfires." Thanks, Jeremy.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’re going to talk about assassinations. We’re going to talk about Israel and Iran. Stay with us.



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Rush Transcript
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.

[Allegro]

.
Subtitles in each video.

Children’s Art Expressions in Tahrir Square


Tahrir’s Revolutionary Artists’ Union | The Real News dot com


Making Music

[cptmarginal]

Fareed Zakaria just had an interview with El Baradai on his GPS show on CNN. Now having a CFR-heavy panel, though it seems very pro-protestor. Zakaria's take echoed many sentiments of this board.

I was looking at the CFR website's board of directors list yesterday and noticed that Fareed Zakaria is one of them:

http://www.cfr.org/about/people/board_of_directors.html

He's also on the board of the Trilateral Commission:

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/anchors_reporter ... areed.html

And a Bilderberg attendee:

http://bilderbergbook.com/index.php?opt ... 5&Itemid=1

Plus he's on the board of Yale, and is a member of the Scroll & Key secret society there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_and_Key

He gave a talk entitled "AMERICA IN A NEW WORLD" at the Bohemian Grove gathering of 2006, among such highlights from other speakers as "GLOBAL FINANCIAL WARRIORS" & "UNTOLD TALES FROM THE COLD WAR"

http://www.sonomacountyfreepress.com/bo ... s2006.html

-

Now, knowing very little about Fareed Zakaria's opinions and having never watched his show - or any other cable TV news show, for that matter - what's up with him? That's a pretty heavy-duty profile, even if I'm not exactly sure of what those groups actually do...

There's this, too:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/1 ... 61685.html

CNN's Fareed Zakaria said on Thursday that he has been having regular discussions with President Obama about national security and foreign policy. He then posted a "clarification" of his statement on Saturday.

Asked by Eliot Spitzer on Thursday's "In The Arena" if Obama has been calling him up lately, Zakaria said, "mostly it's been face-to-face meetings...usually organized by Tom Donilon, the national security adviser."

He said Obama was spending a lot of time "thinking about the issues of the Arab Spring," and added, "it's been a very thoughtful conversation. You know, we'll see where it goes."

[Allegro]

.

Egyptian Women Demand Justice, Denounce Military
— Subtitles | The Real News dot com | February 9, 2012

[AlicetheKurious]

Thanks so much for that video, Allegro. It brought tears to my eyes. God bless Egyptian women. Those who oppress them are secretly terrified of them.

[Allegro]

Thanks so much for that video, Allegro. It brought tears to my eyes. God bless Egyptian women. Those who oppress them are secretly terrified of them.

If you don’t mind me saying, those men should be terrified of them, especially women in groups.

And, thank you, for the Angry Arab link. I found stories about music, there.

[JackRiddler]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/02/ ... tion/print

April 02, 2012

"The Biggest Source of Social Injustice"
Egypt: Marinated in Corruption

by PATRICK COCKBURN

Who shall doubt “the secret hid
Under Cheop’s pyramid”
Was that the contractors did
Cheops out of several millions?
Or that Joseph’s sudden rise
To Comptroller of Supplies
Was a fraud of monstrous size
On King Pharaoh’s swart civilians?

Rudyard Kipling’s caustic verses denouncing the corruption of state officials sound as sharp and relevant today as they did in 1886. He drew examples from ancient Egypt, though his experience was in British-ruled India where things were supposedly better run. But Egyptians today should see nothing much to complain of in his picture of Egypt, ancient and modern, as a corrupt and parasitic growth siphoning off wealth into the pockets of the few.



The cynicism of Egyptians about the greed of their rulers knows few limits. A foot-and-mouth epidemic has been spreading through the countryside. Ruined farmers are dumping dead cattle outside official buildings to protest against the failure of the government to help. In Cairo, people have largely stopped eating meat; butchers’ shops are empty. I went into one in the Abdeen district of central Cairo last week where Islam Manas and Abu Galal were cutting thin steaks from a joint of beef, but there were no customers. They put all the blame on the authorities, Mr Manas saying that “the government is pumping out a lot of propaganda about the epidemic so officials can make money out of selling fish and chicken”. Other butchers assumed that the state’s only reaction to this minor crisis would be to seek to profit from it.

Presumption of official wrong-doing and self-interest is pervasive. I also talked to bus drivers who are on strike across Cairo. At the Moneib bus station, Khalaf Abdul Kader, who has worked on the buses for 16 years, suspected that one reason why the state bus company did not want any reform was that its officials were fearful of having to account for how they have been spending the company’s revenues in past decades. He said the strikers wanted not only better benefits, but “we want some respect from our employers”.

Official corruption played a central role in provoking the uprisings that swept through the Arab world last year. In Egypt, the incompetence and dysfunctional nature of the state seems worse than elsewhere. For instance, one-third of the Egyptian budget is spent on subsidies, but Magda Kandil, the executive director of the Egyptian Centre for Economic Studies, says they “are the biggest source of social injustice”. Subsidies such as bottled butane gas, a necessity for cooking in districts without main gas, is heavily subsidized but the money disappears into the pockets of middlemen so gas is still expensive. Bread, though cheap, is often inedible because the government doesn’t inspect bakeries. Heavily subsidized cheap fuel means streets clogged with vehicles and some of the world’s worst traffic jams. And so underpaid are officials that they cannot survive without bribes.

What makes Egyptian corruption so striking is the extent of open and degrading inequality compared with other countries in the region. Some 45 per cent of the 85 million Egyptians scrape by on less than $2 (£1.25) a day, while a small layer at the top live in palaces and work in air-conditioned glass towers. It would be difficult for anywhere to be more corrupt than Iraq, but at least it has $100bn in oil revenues. Iraqi soldiers and primary school teachers take home a reasonable salary, however much their leaders steal.

Corruption in Egypt is spreading fast into new and profitable areas: cigarettes are smuggled in from abroad and sold at rock-bottom prices. This is reported to cost the state $663m a year. The export of rice has been banned, but half the annual crop – some 600,000 tons – is smuggled out of the country. Importers in the Gulf say they can still buy Egyptian rice, but they have to deal with gangsters to get it.

Can this system of special deals, privileges and corruption be dismantled or even reformed? The question goes right to the heart of Egyptian politics. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces which, in so far as anybody is running Egypt, is in charge, wants the military to retain the perks it has accumulated since Nasser seized power in 1952.

Probably the Muslim Brotherhood will let it do so, so long as the army loses its political supremacy. This may well happen. Professor Khalid Fahmy, chairman of the department of history at the American University in Cairo, says that the weakness of the council and the army is that “[they] do not have a political partner like South American military regimes, which are allied to big landowners or big capital. The military needs the brotherhood more than the brotherhood needs them.”

Egyptian liberals often depress themselves with talk of the triumph of the counter-revolution, the success of the deep-laid plots of the military to retain power, or the coming enforced Islamicization of the country under the brotherhood. Certainly, nothing is settled in Egypt and nobody knows how much power anybody holds or will hold infuture.

As crime and violence increases, the supreme council has encouraged xenophobia by persecuting foreign NGOs and presented itself as a bulwark against chaos. These tactics have had some success, but the military appears to be making up its strategy as it goes along. For instance, Egyptians are suspicious of foreigners, particularly Americans, so the persecution of NGOs was going well until the council lost its nerve under US pressure, allowing American NGO members, previously forbidden to leave Egypt, to go home. Violence has increased since the January 2011 revolution but, outside North Sinai, Egypt is remarkably peaceful.

The struggle between the council and the brotherhood is increasingly intense as the latter tries to get rid of a military-appointed government. The brotherhood, which won a plurality in the parliamentary election, has now decided it will run its own candidate for president in May. A new constitution is being drawn up. The army will fight to retain its authority, but the crucial dates in the political calendar revolve around elections or actions by elected bodies. The good news for the brotherhood is that the militarized police state that has misruled Egypt for 200 years, should not be a hard act to follow.

Whoever rules Egypt in future will have to deal with the legacy of a racketeering state in which education and health are in a state of collapse. Egyptian officialdom is unlikely to become honest, or even competent, overnight. Good times may not be around the corner, but the old police state that treated Egypt as if it were a conquered country has probably gone for ever.


PATRICK COCKBURN is the author of “Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.

[AlicetheKurious]

Can this system of special deals, privileges and corruption be dismantled or even reformed? The question goes right to the heart of Egyptian politics.

Yes, it can. Easily. One of the weaknesses of the Mubarak regime is that wealth and power became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The "Mubarak" class is tiny, and its members are very well known. The problem is that, with the exception of a dozen or so top officials, every one of Mubarak's cronies is still in place, controlling every aspect of the Egyptian economy. Nothing has changed at all, except that they are systematically and vindictively punishing the Egyptian people for the revolution.

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces which, in so far as anybody is running Egypt, is in charge, wants the military to retain the perks it has accumulated since Nasser seized power in 1952.

Until 1967, there was virtually no financial corruption in Egypt, because the nationalist, revolutionary environment provided neither the incentive nor the opportunity for it. The armed forces enjoyed enormous prestige and power, but this did not translate into the accumulation of any individual fortunes. Very few luxuries were available, but people were well-fed, well-educated and had access to good health care. Property and consumer goods did not confer social prestige, on the contrary. The public sector was huge, and the government invested heavily in industry, agriculture and defense, as well as infrastructure and education.

This all changed when Sadat decreed his "Open Door Policy" (Infitah) in the mid-1970s, and also began heavily borrowing from the IMF and the World Bank. USAID and other Western foreign aid money began pouring into the country, especially into the pockets of certain well-connected individuals. The country was flooded with imported luxury items, purchased with hard currency. The late 1970s witnessed the emergence of "overnight millionaires" who began throwing their money and their weight around. They were joined by wealthy citizens from Gulf countries, who acquired homes in Cairo and spent lavishly on all kinds of things, including prostitutes. This process accelerated during the 1980s, when the most obscene displays of wealth became common, while poverty skyrocketed across the country (along with the national debt). Farmers around the cities found themselves unable to compete with the avalanche of cheap (and in some cases free) food imports that arrived as 'foreign aid' (much of it was dumped excess food production from the West, to maintain prices at home). Instead, they built shanty-towns on top of their farmlands and charged rent to the peasants migrating towards the already overcrowded urban centers, escaping even worse poverty back home. Ugly and unsafe jerry-built housing spread like a blight across the landscape, while bribed officials looked the other way.

At the same time, the public sector was badly deteriorated. The state essentially stopped functioning. The Egyptian public infrastructure, public education and health care systems, which had been the best in the Middle East, were starved of funding and became abysmal. Salaries in the public sector, which was by far the largest employer, could no longer support a decent standard of living. By the late 1980s, Egypt was two countries: the largest comprised the majority of the population, which depended on the government for its employment, for its subsidized food, for its health care, for its drinking water, housing, transportation, etc. Their lives steadily deteriorated in every way. Those lucky enough to hold positions that provided an opportunity to seek bribes, did so, and some managed to claw their way out. Most of the others just sank into desperation and squalor.

At the same time, a minority of the population, especially those whose income was in US dollars, enjoyed a very different standard of living: they inhabited luxury homes, their children attended expensive private schools (mostly foreign), they consumed imported food and drink and bottled water, wore imported designer clothing, drove luxury cars, and when they required medical attention, they either traveled abroad or sought treatment in one of the very expensive private hospitals that sprang up across the country. This was a consuming class, which produced very little.

The catch-words of the 1980s and 1990s were "privatization" and "globalization". The government confined itself to selling off the wealth of the state to private domestic, Arab and foreign businessmen for far below its real value, and pocketing the money. Highly profitable state-owned factories, banks, and huge swathes of public land were "privatized" in this way.

By the 1990s, the government consisted of a mafia of "businessmen" who ran the country only to maximize their own profits. For example, one businessman who made his fortune in private luxury health care, was appointed Health Minister; another, who made his fortune building luxury tourist resorts, became Tourism Minister. The Finance Minister was on the board of the IMF; the Minister of Investments was also Managing Director at the World Bank. The Secretary-General of the ruling National Democratic Party, nicknamed Hosny Mubarak's "third son", became a multi-billionaire by monopolizing the nation's steel industry. And so on, and so on. The foxes were running the hen-house, and eating all the chickens.

Incidentally, with the exception of a very few, Egypt is still firmly in the grip of the predatory Mubarak gang, and still being bled dry, under the watchful eye of the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces), with the full approval of the US, whose permission they still seek before doing anything.

Professor Khalid Fahmy, chairman of the department of history at the American University in Cairo, says that the weakness of the council and the army is that “[they] do not have a political partner like South American military regimes, which are allied to big landowners or big capital. The military needs the brotherhood more than the brotherhood needs them.”

No, the SCAF does not "need" the Brotherhood; they are using the Brotherhood to fulfill Mubarak's twin threats: "It's either me or chaos," and "It's either me or the Brotherhood," to get people to regret launching the revolution. The SCAF currently controls an estimated 40% of Egypt's economy; they ARE the big landowners and big capital. They also control the media, the police, much of the judiciary and just about everything else. In contrast to the revolutionaries, the MB and the Salafists have a clear leadership. The MB especially is very hierarchical in structure, and the Salafists are dependent on financial support from the oil-rich Gulf. If the SCAF wanted to, they could get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Saudi-backed Salafists literally overnight, just as they've rounded up and arrested and killed so many of the revolutionaries. They could confiscate their property, shut down their businesses and freeze their bank accounts, and there's not a damn thing that anybody could do about it. Not one damn thing. That they choose not to do this, demonstrates that they find them useful.

The struggle between the council and the brotherhood is increasingly intense as the latter tries to get rid of a military-appointed government. The brotherhood, which won a plurality in the parliamentary election, has now decided it will run its own candidate for president in May. A new constitution is being drawn up. The army will fight to retain its authority, but the crucial dates in the political calendar revolve around elections or actions by elected bodies. The good news for the brotherhood is that the militarized police state that has misruled Egypt for 200 years, should not be a hard act to follow.

No. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists have allowed themselves to fall into a trap. The SCAF promoted them, turned a blind eye to their illegal funding activities, and gave them a parliamentary majority in fraudulent elections. The deal was that they could have the parliament, as long as they left the presidency alone, and elected a constituent assembly that would be representative and inclusive. In return, they supported the SCAF as it committed war crimes against the people. They resisted enormous public pressure to remove the SCAF-appointed Prime Minister and his government, who are widely despised. They have taken no steps to combat corruption, or lifted a finger to alleviate the suffering of the people or remove the Mubarak cronies from their influential posts. In fact, they've done nothing positive at all, in the months since they were "elected", except get involved in scandals that have ruined their reputation, in some cases made them a laughing-stock and destroyed much of the mystique and goodwill they'd enjoyed before.

But the MB and the Salafists got greedy: not content with dominating the parliament, they took over all its committees, elbowing aside far more qualified and experienced MPs. They submitted a plan to "reform" the dreaded Ministry of Interior, which runs the police state, by filling it with their own cadres, while leaving its repressive structure intact. They "elected" themselves to more than 50% of the seats in the constituent assembly that will be producing the new constitution. There are leaks from reliable sources that, in fact, an Islamist constitution has already been written, months ago, and the constituent assembly will simply rubber-stamp it. And finally, the MB broke all their public and private promises by submitting not one, but two of their own candidates for the presidency.

Most seriously of all, they began to go behind the SCAF's back and negotiate directly with the Americans. All the other stuff was no problem for the SCAF, but this was another matter. This, and only this, is the source of the increasingly open animosity between the two erstwhile 'partners'. It will make the approaching confrontation especially vindictive.

The trap is this: the MB and the Salafists are paper tigers. They've forgotten that all the power of the state remains firmly in the hands of the SCAF, and that just as the SCAF handed them the parliament, it is the SCAF and the Americans and nobody else who will decide who the next president will be. The revolution had nullified Egypt's old constitution, but the public referendum run by the SCAF last March revived it, with only a few minor changes. The MB and the Salafists stupidly went along, blinded by their greed, and trusting that later, they'd be able to mobilize the masses to stand behind them. This constitution gives almost godlike powers to the president, including the power to maintain the State of Emergency which has been imposed since 1981, and to dissolve parliament at will. All the MB and the Salafists have accomplished during their 'honeymoon' with the SCAF is to destroy most of their popular base, meaning that a large sector of the population will be quite pleased to see them receive their comeuppance, even if it comes at the hands of the hated SCAF.

In other words, the next president will be chosen by the SCAF, and he will become Egypt's new puppet dictator, while the SCAF continues to run the country from behind the scenes, with the SCAF in turn being controlled by their American handlers.

Bottom line: the presidential election will mark the final stage in the restoration of the Mubarak regime, but without Mubarak himself.

Of course, this will not be the end -- at the grassroots level, far from all these machinations the revolution is ongoing, and undeterred, and will continue through all these plots and conspiracies and reversals until it achieves all its goals. Believe it or not, I'm still incredibly optimistic.

[JackRiddler]

Thank you. That was exactly the kind of informed, long-form analysis I was hoping to see by posting Cockburn. Hope you don't mind the bait, because I love the results and they make more sense than he does.